"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real. It doesn't happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.

The Boy's Uncle made me Real," he said. "That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always."

--The Velveteen Rabit

"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened, and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you, and afterwards it all belongs to you."

March 8th, 2009

ficlet, for kijikun @ 11:50 pm

Because they're now available to me in a format I actually kind of like, and because anonymous trolls are awful:

Daniel is never going to admit it, but he prefers talking to Laurie - eating dinner with her, walking down the street with her, window shopping and playing the "what would I buy if I hadn't spent all my money on repairing Archie" game, bouncing an idea for modifications to his costume, or his gear off her and seeing what she thought -- to the sex.

He prefers fighting or saving people next to her, too.

Sex is... Only with adrenaline pumping through his veins is his need raw enough, intense enough to overcome the fact that her body, even muscled as it is, is soft where it should be hard, smells of women where it should smell of semen and musk, that even though he likes her, even maybe loves her, she's not what his body really wants.

Women aren't what his body really wants.

But right now, Archie is humming around them and they've only barely escaped the most recent fight with their lives, and Laurie is wearing nothing but her high-heeled black boots, writhing against him while he still has his mask on, and things are good.

And if he thinks of freckles dotting pale skin like ink blots when he kisses her shoulder, hears someone else's voice growling "Leave mask on," when she runs her hands over his cowl and breathes "Leave the goggles on. I want you to see me," sees blood spattered across snow and hears the sound of his own screaming when she climaxes with a choked-off little scream of her own, he's very careful never to tell her.

Seriously, your fic for this pairing is awesome - like crimsonquills, I'm not a huge fan of the graphic novel itself (other people find Frank Miller grating and annoying - I don't mind him so much burt have a similar problem with Alan Moore), but I enjoyed the movie a surprising amount and love the way you write them (with enough warm&fizzy to satisfy my fangirl heart, but without forgetting just how deeply screwed-up Rorschach is or making it too fluffy).

Nice. I have a hard time seeing this ship, but from Dan's point of view I can see it working.

Then again, maybe I just have a thing for "Patrick Wilson characters secretly fantasize about sociopaths while having sex with women," since I wrote a very similar drabble in Phantom of the Opera fandom.

Yay! (Also, your fic with the surgery in the alley is beyond awesome, and the Twilight Lady one is just the perfect combination of hot and hurty and why are you and kijikun making me ship people from a comic I don't even like?)

I'm allowed to like Dan and Rorshach (from a distance, in a way that doesn't involve having to touch or smell him) and still dislike Alan Moore's sledghammery political commentary and WTF!aliens ending, right?

This makes me sad and really happy at the same time. The entire thing is very poignant, and I enjoy how you made Laurie the perfect best friend ever with Dan being hung up on what he wants and can never have again.

Then again it's really late and I could just be in shock of the awesome.

Thanks! Dan/Rorscach/Laurie as an OT3 are my secret guilty pleasure when it comes to Watchmen fic (okay, no, they're my openly admitted to guilty pleasure. Eddie/Sally is my secret guilty pleasure because, well, yeah) but Dan/Laurie alone is not so much my thing. I think they work better as friends than lovers, too, without Rorschach to shake things up a bit.

There's a great fancomic out there by... someone... that has Laurie telling Dan, "Our friendship is the only positive relationship either of us has left! Quick, let's ruin it!"

re: Daniel...prefers talking to Laurie...to the sex

Though I read Daniel as a bisexual, but hey, our tastes shifts around, and Walter and Twilight Lady is probably closer to each other than Laurie to either of them, in taste (or it's how I feel about it at least).

The las paragraph is perfect, with the freckles and the ink blots and the snow and the choked screaming. I can sort of see those two walking up, than Daniel freezing a the door and staring at the snow in stopped motion, while Laurie hooks an arm around him.